It's the birthday of poet William Edgar Stafford, (books by this author) born in Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1914, the same year as American poets Weldon Kees and Randall Jarrell and John Berryman...Stafford usually wrote in the early morning. He sat down with a pen and paper, took a look out the window, and waited for something to occur to him. He wrote about simple things like farms and dead deer and winter. He wrote about the West and his parents and cottonwood trees. He wrote, "In the winter, in the dark hours, when others / were asleep, I found these words and put them / together by their appetites and respect for / each other. In stillness, they jostled. They traded / meanings while pretending to have only one."After a brief biographical note, Keillor read Stafford's poem "What's In My Journal."
Check out the Friends of William Stafford's events for birthday celebrations around the world. Who knows, there just might be one in your neighborhood.
If nothing else, read a poem or two, or write one yourself.
If you'd like to try Stafford's own method, get up before the sunrise and before anyone else is up. Make some coffee. Get a few sheets of paper and a pen. Lay down on your couch, in your quiet house. Write the first thing that enters your mind. Make a poem out of it.
But in reality, it's not how you write. No one method will work the same way for two people. The point is to find out what works for you, and follow it into oblivion.
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